22 July 2012

Today we
have two short pamphlets one by Engels and one by Marx, one on “Authority” and
one on “Indifferentism”, compiled together in one document, attached, and downloadable
via the link below.

Says
Engels: Either the anti-authoritarians don't know what they're talking about,
in which case they are creating nothing but confusion; or they do know, and in
that case they are betraying the movement of the proletariat. In either case
they serve the reactionaries.

This was
written in 1872 and published in 1874, in Italy. It is a “classic” because it
addresses a familiar argument. The “politically correct” of the day were saying
that all forms of “authority” were bad and must be done away with. Engels
corrects this “politically correct” error.

Marx,
writing in 1873, also for eventual publication in Italy in 1874, addresses what
he calls “Political Indifferentism”. In this pamphlet, Marx first quotes
Proudhon, and readers can be deceived to think that Marx is approving of
Proudhon. But this is only polemic. Marx quotes Proudhon extensively, only so
as all the more thoroughly to contradict him.

This is a
very profound lesson of Karl Marx’s. What he is saying is that although, under
the bourgeois dictatorship, in the bourgeois democracy, whose choices are all
bourgeois choices, yet we cannot therefore say that we should have nothing to
do with it, and refuse to choose.

On the
contrary, we have to study it with more attention than anyone else and make the
tactically right choices in the interest of the working class.

In South
Africa in the early 21st century, clearly the communists are deeply
involved in the politics of the bourgeois state, and Marx would, according to
this text, say that such involvement is more than inevitable: It is deliberate
and it is right. The communists cannot remain indifferent to what the
bourgeoisie is doing.